Hospitality 4

Intellectual Hospitality is Reciprocal

For this framing of laudatory intellectual exchange is that of reciprocity. Each of the interlocutors shows hospitality to his fellow interlocutor in that he takes up the other's thought seriously and as if it were his own, thereby instituting a relationship of reciprocity. (131).

For example:
Initially, we were aware of the ways that the instructors were working to join their understandings of language, our notions of where to place things, what email means, how long it should take, etc. One specific example of this is a series of exchanges we had last year following a collective reading of Ira Shor's work, Empowering Education. While the Sharing Cultures Project Chicago served as the initial host, choosing the book and initiating the discussion, we came to understand the reciprocity of the exchange in reading the words of Thoko Bayati who brought to us a perspective on Ira Shor that not one of us had actually considered. For Bayati, Shor's notion of a student-centered education was misplaced. This logic, she noted, undercut the very idea of a democratic education if you were going to move the power from the teacher and then just give it to the student. Now, I recall this observation because it is evidence of intellectual hospitality: we hosted an exchange and then we received and idea; she received the opportunity and she hosted/gave to us her perspective. This event is not only evidence of intellectual hospitality, but an actual moment that allows us to see the ways that the Sharing Cultures Project is ripe for this sort of exchange. The Sharing Cultures Project itself – and the space it enables – is a project of intellectual hospitality. We are Sharing and not Colonizing ideas – they are being simultaneously given and received over and over to the point that, as we note above, there is no longer a site of authorship or identity.